Kod is a new Node.js scriptable code editor for OSX

OT: Is "performant" really a word? I see it on HN all the time, and it strikes me as made-up business jargon.

Comments like the parent make me sad. It could be summed up as "node.js, damn hipsters." It's just another form of fanboyism, except negative.

There are not many good, scriptable editors for programmers. Actually, I would consider only 3 for serious use: Emacs, Vim and TextMate. Of these, only one has really good integration with OS X.

If I was considering switching editors, the language that is used to extend it would be one of the most important factors (I love Emacs, but Emacs Lisp is seriously broken). The fact that Kod uses node.js means two things:

1) It's JavaScript, so it's high level, has nice semantics and it's extremely popular;

2) It uses a reasonably fast dialect of JS, and has the necessary infrastructure, like CommonJS modules and access to the filesystem.

So, Node.js is the thing that makes this topic actually hacker-news-worthy.

Have you tried Zooom/2? http://coderage-software.com/zooom/

It's because Emacs is one of the few editors where you can actually manage 90 and more buffers -- thanks to the fact that you can refer to them by name.

There's a selection bias at work - emacs.

I haven't met many people who casually use emacs (other than those trying it out for the firs time, or giving it another shot, (or another, or another))

For those who really GET emacs, and think in emacs, it becomes their entire workflow - as they can automate everything from emacs, incrementally. Those guys that work with 80 or 90 buffers open didn't start out that way - they grew over the years to working that way by tweaking more and more functionality to bend it to their will.

You can extend lots of editors - but there's something about emacs and it's lisp nature that lends itself to this kind of developer.

I believe you may want to check with java programmers close to you. When using eclipse I usually have 30-60 files open, probably for the same reason emacs users have them: it's very easy, has little overhead and accessing the working set is faster this way.

The reason it does not happen with gedit & kate is that tab-based interface fall into uselessness with too many tabs, if they do not provide alternative methods of navigating them than "click on the right one".

IMO, of course.

That's because in many respects Emacs isn't so much an editor as an operating environment. You can do pretty much anything from/in Emacs if you're so inclined. If you know Emacs' lisp well enough you don't ever need to leave. Heck, Emacs can even make Coffee (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CoffeeMode).

To view Emacs as an editor, while technically accurate is not necessarily a fair comparison because it does so much more.

Exactly, considering that we still have textmate around, I am not sure if scripting in node.js with OSX API is the best way to pull it out.

As I mentioned AppleScript seems to be a better fit for an OSX-only editor.

Of course any new things are welcomed, just that I am not at the best positive about this.

Show me a usable file tree view that doesn't look like crap for vim or emacs, and I will go back to using them.

With today's web frameworks, when I hop between files all the time, I want a neat visual file tree.

Emacs is a fantastic editor (and I think I can say that I am what you call a power user), but Emacs Lisp is a terrible, terrible language. The more I use it, the more I hate it. And it's not because of the lispiness or parens -- Common Lisp was my Language of Choice for many years.

Having an editor that I could extend in a real programming language (and JS is actually very nice once you grasp stuff like prototype inheritance and learn to avoid the... uhm, bad parts) would be simply awesome. And if it was pretty and integrated with OS X I would be willing to pay hard cash for it.

I'm a TM user, and I'm happy with the product, but there are some areas that could use improvement. First, there's undo. Undo in TM is letter-by-letter. That makes it pretty useless for moving very far back in to history. Then there's any kind of intelligent auto-completion. Auto-complete in TM is as rudimentary as it gets. It's basically word matching for the current document, or from a bundle.

I still think TM is the best editor for me, and I'd happily use it for the next 25 years without a single gripe if I had to, but I'm not sure the editor community is going to just sit around while TM stagnates.

The big issue is that Textmate 2.0 was announced as a free upgrade years ago and it has yet to appear. Joe Hewitt's tweet kinda says it all: http://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/14998671708

I actually agree 99% with you- I happily use TM more or less constantly, and have since it was first released. That said, there are four features (or feature areas) that I feel like would add immeasurably to my TextMate experience:

1. Split-window editing 2. Multithreaded searching, pasting, etc.- having the whole app hang while doing a "find in project" is a major drag, especially when it's due to, oh, say, having a bunch of files open from a slow network share. Which brings me to... 3. Better handling of files opened from remote volumes- another case where multiple threads would probably help. 4. Better handling of really long lines when word-wrap is turned off. There is obviously something O(n) going on at the line level (where n is the number of characters on the line), and it makes handling long runs of text rather painful at times.

So, there it is: my TextMate wish list. Modulo those four things, TextMate is currently pretty close to ideal, IMHO. I love its syntax highlighting grammar, its snippets, its macro capabilities, etc. etc. The Latex package is fabulous, and has singlehandedly done a lot to make my dissertation-writing process bearable.

No browser stuff and Node.js is running in an isolated process. CSS is simply the "language" in which you define the looks of the editor and has nothing to do with web browsers or html.

The popup with the list of class members (I think XCode calls it "Code Sense") tends not to work if your code is too complicated. I know that sounds like a silly reason not to use an IDE, but I surprise myself with how much I miss it.

The screenshot displays C code.

That looks great - I'll give it a try. Thanks!